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Wells Fargo & Co. decided to exit reverse mortgages after federal officials insisted it foreclose on elderly customers who were behind on property tax and insurance payments, a Wells executive wrote in an email to business contacts Friday.

The San Francisco-based bank had other reasons to shut down its 1,000-employee reverse mortgage unit. The industry's lack of growth, declining housing prices and other issues have reduced its draw for major lenders, prompting other market leaders such as Bank of America Corp. and Financial Freedom for Seniors Inc. to pull out as well. The business is simply not central to the mortgage operations of Wells and others.

But the pullout occurred after a disagreement between Wells and the Department of Housing and Urban Development came to a head, Phil Bracken, an executive vice president of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, wrote in the email. Wells was worried that HUD would force it to foreclose on senior citizens with delinquent reverse mortgages insured by the FHA, according to a copy of the message obtained by American Banker.

"The last straw in our decision was the recent HUD decision to require servicers to initiate foreclosure on the Senior Reverse Mortgage customers [who] could not pay their taxes and insurance," the email says. "When a product or program creates more reputation risk than value … well … you get the picture."

Under a reverse mortgage, homeowners must continue paying property taxes and insurance premiums. If they lack the money, the lender makes the payments for at least two years while attempting to work out a repayment plan. In the event that effort fails, the lender is then supposed to seek authorization from HUD to begin proceedings that lead to foreclosure.

HUD declined to comment on Wells' decision to exit the business, and an attempt to contact Bracken late Friday was not successful.

A Wells spokeswoman attributed the move to a more general concern over the bank's inability to assess whether a senior could afford homeownership, even with a reverse mortgage.

"That, I would say, was much more of concern than anything else," she said. "We were talking to HUD, and looking for ways to revise the program. We decided to discontinue these originations because we felt we'd exhausted our options."

Industry participants said that Wells departure was regrettable.

"We're hoping that the news of Wells announcement will serve as a call to action to expedite the department concluding work on" rule changes, said Peter Bell, head of the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association.

Wells' departure was unwelcome news for the industry at large.

"Nobody who wants to be in the reverse mortgage space is going to be helped by Wells withdrawing," said David Kittle, a former chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association who now works for mortgage auditing firm IMARC LLC. "The optics are, ‘Oh my god, Wells is getting out. What's wrong?"

While the industry has generally grumbled about the FHA's failure to adapt its reverse mortgage guarantee program in the wake of the housing collapse, the reverse mortgage market's disappointing growth and HUD restrictions on cross-selling of reverse mortgages may also have influenced Wells' decision. A Wells spokeswoman said they were not significant concerns.

But there was no denying that expectations for the market are much lower than they used to be. As recently as mid-2009, Wells executives such as Peter Katsaros in Wells' Senior Products unit told Retirement Income Reporter that the product was certain to be a winner because of the imminent wave of retiring baby boomers.

The fallout from the housing crisis has since caught up with the industry, sapping about 30% of its volume in 2010 alone. According to HUD data, Wells underwrote only 12,000 reverse mortgages between October and May — a sum that made it the market leader but amounted to only a pittance in hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage originations.

"Whether they were making or losing money, and I presume they were making money, it wouldn't even have been a rounding error," said Jeff Lewis, the chairman of Generation Mortgage Co. in Atlanta, the largest independent reverse mortgage underwriter in the country. "I think [the big banks' withdrawal] is in a lot of respects a function of the government concentrating the financial services industry. A niche product like this … is not worth the time or complexity for institutions that are so large."

Another factor that may have weighed on the business were restrictions against cross-selling reverse mortgages that have been in place since the 2008 housing reforms. Lewis said they prevent him from partnering with life insurance companies to offer policies that could pay off the reverse mortgage when the borrower dies. Wells would likely have found the rules to be particularly galling giving its institutional focus on cross selling.

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